The
following is a revised version of a conference paper given last Saturday at the
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) annual
meeting. It represents unfinished thinking about a work-in-progress, tentatively entitled God in the Think Tank: Faith and Foreign Affairs
in the American Century. Besides some excellent presentations by friends-of-the-blog Lauren Turek and Dan Hummel, and many more I wish I could have heard, the highlight of this conference for me was a roundtable on the state of the
study of religion and American foreign relations, which included Leo Ribuffo,
Molly Worthen, William Inboden, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and RIAH’s own Ed Blum and Cara Burnidge. Dan will have more to say about that session tomorrow.

SHAFR
Annual Meeting, June 21 2014, Lexington, KY

Panel: Finding Religion
in American Foreign Policy

Chair: Michaela
Hoenicke-Moore

Presenters: Gene
Zubovich, Caitlin Carenen, Mark Edwards

Edwards Paper: The
Secularization of American Foreign Policy

We may debate when and how the
“religious turn” in diplomatic history occurred, but there can be little doubt
that it has occurred. Thanks to the
work of Dianne Kirby, Andrew Rotter, William Inboden, Andrew Preston, and so
many others, scholars now understand sacred matters as constitutive as well as
constituted elements of American globalism. Religion is not epiphenomenal; it is not merely a mask for realpolitik. As Preston writes in Sword of the Spirit,
Shield of Faith (2012):

Aside
from the personal faith of individual policymakers, religion has been integral
to American politics and culture, and to America’s sense of itself, and thus
also to the products of politics and culture, such as foreign policy. . . . In
times of war, religious liberals and conservatives, militants and pacifists
have all called upon God to sanctify their cause, and all have viewed America
as God’s chosen land. As a result, U. S.
foreign policy has often acquired the tenor of a moral crusade (1).

In fact, Preston is so successful at
tracking religious presence in U. S. statecraft that he has led
me to ask a new question: Why is there so much secularism in American foreign
relations? Why did we need a religious turn if religion's always been there? For some time now, historians
of religion and politics have been trying to debunk the myth of the naturally secular
public square—a significant project, indeed.
But perhaps it is time we confess that, in America at least, secularism
was something that had to be constructed deliberately within, against, and even on
behalf of a normative Protestant culture and politics.

This paper will explore the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) as just such a site of “religio-secularism”
(I learned of this term from Karen DeVries, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, who has offered it as an alternative
to Habermas’s “postsecular”). The
CFR was begun in 1918 by a group of New York swells sweet on the business ends
of Wilsonianism-corporate lawyers and bankers mainly. The CFR’s swing to
secular statecraft came in 1921, when it joined with the fledgling Institute for
International Affairs (IIA). The IIA was
the offshoot of Wilson’s "scientific peace" planning group known as “ the Inquiry." The new Council’s members willfully tried to
build discursive spaces free from religious outlooks and agendas. Secularization, as they
witnessed AND championed it, entailed the transfer of cultural authority from religious
to non-religious actors and institutions.
We should take their common-sense definition of secularization seriously
yet critically. Indeed, current writing
on religion and the secular view them both as dynamic, inter-related projects
in pursuit of public power. There are no
pure religious nor singular secular realms, but rather there are multiple
secularisms produced in relation to multiple religions.

If historiography be our guide, the CFR’s
relationship to Protestantism is the perfect place to explore this confluence
of religion and secularism in American foreign policy. The best survey of the Council, Robert
Schulzinger’s Wise Men of Foreign Affairs
(1984) barely mentions religion at all.
Martin Eerdman’s Building the
Kingdom of God on Earth (2005), however, sees CFR members as heralds of
faith-based world government—a global City of God. Who is right?

Both, of course (but Schulzinger more
so). To appreciate fully Schulzinger’s
wise men of irreligion, we must first admit with Preston and others the
Protestant incitement to global American expansion in the decades following
1890 (2). These were critical times in
which gentleman policymakers sought strenuously to secure what Senator Albert
Beveridge called the “empire of our principles” by means of guns, gunboats, and
new exports like DuPont gunpowder (3).
Missionaries exerted an enormous influence on this imperial American age
by serving 1) as apostles of information about foreign peoples and 2) as high
priests of advice about how best to win over the hearts and minds of those same
peoples for God and Fordism. The early
CFR itself entertained religious speakers such as the globe-trotting YMCA evangelist
Sherwood Eddy and the Reverend Arthur J. Brown.
Brown foresaw a “new Asia” being brought forth by Western missionary
cultivation of an indigenous “Christian leadership” (4). Brown's reference to "Christian" here was racial as well as religious, drawing upon centuries of Western efforts to distinguish themselves from invented Global Southern savagery. Scholars such as Joseph Grabill, James Reed,
and Susan Harris, among others, have documented that transnational Protestant
personnel like Brown decisively shaped American policy and identity in
relationship to the Near and Far East (5).
Missionary diplomacy reached its apogee in the ministry, er, Presidency
of Woodrow Wilson. Cara Burnidge, in her
excellent forthcoming study, A Peaceful
Conquest (Chicago, 2015), argues that Wilsonianism was functionally a
liberal Protestant venture seeking the global triumph of Christian Americanism. Wilson’s civil
religion of national expansion was entirely in keeping with the proliferation
of Christian imagery during what Phillip Jenkins has recently called the “Great
and Holy” First World War. The absence
of distinctive Christian rhetoric in peace talks simply reveals that what Wilson believed to be the sacred
could assume forms other than what historians traditionally consider to be "religious"(6).

However, the CFR’s merger with the IIA in 1921 marked a new direction in American statecraft—away from imperial
Christian developmentalism and toward secular scientific expertise. Few incorporations have been as
fortuitous. The Council’s cadre of
corporate bankers and lawyers, following the Wilsonian setback, was flush with
capital but wanting for vision and purpose.
Meanwhile, the remnants of Wilson’s “Inquiry” team wanted to establish a
permanent foreign policy think tank on the model of the British Royal Institute
for International Affairs (RIIA). Wilson’s
best and brightest had the vision and purpose but not the money or location. Council directors thus decided to “re-create”
the CFR along the proposed IIA lines (7).
The IIA’s predominant constituency, social scientists, now possessed the
resources they needed to free foreign policymaking from the constraints of explicit
Christian prerogatives.

To be sure, the new CFR boasted few
outright secularists beyond Inquiry veterans Walter Lippmann and Columbia
historian J. T. Shotwell. In books such
as The Religious Revolution of Today
(1913) and Intelligence and Politics
(1921), Shotwell joined John Dewey in outright criticism of evangelical
Protestantism’s public influence.
Shotwell prophesied instead religious privatization making way for genuine
sciences of human living (8). The lives
of other CFR insiders—Whitney Shepherdson, A. C. Coolidge, Isaiah Bowman,
Hamilton Fish Armstrong—were more marked by religious indifference than
outright hostility. Members shared
Shotwell’s commitment to experimental over revelatory intelligence, nonetheless. The institutional word best reflecting that
common secularism was “nonpartisan.” The
most obvious meaning of nonpartisan, in light of the failed League of Nations
vote, was of course political: The CFR wanted both Republicans and Democrats to work together toward irresistible commercial empire.
However, the religious implications of nonpartisan surfaced on occasion. According to a 1921 “Statement of Aims and
Activities,”

The
Council is not a trade nor profit organization nor has it any connection with
any political party or religious or social reform agency. It is an entirely non-partisan body, pleading
no special cause and committed to no particular point of view or program. Its aim is to aid by scientific and impartial
study in the development of a better understanding of international problems
and a reasoned American foreign policy (9).

“Non-partisan” here helped Council
members both reinforce as well as refocus what Amy Kaplan has called the “double
discourse of American imperialism.” As
Kaplan explains, “the discourse of U. S. imperialism is . . . double, because it delineates national
power that is simultaneously disembodied from territorial boundaries and
embodied in the American man.” The
realistic Wilsonians of the Inquiry and the CFR carried forward America’s
liberation from geography. But they
simultaneously promoted a new ideal of imperial manhood: The “expert.” Following WWI, the seemingly boundless American
Century found face, not in Teddy Roosevelt, but in Herbert Hoover (10).

We should not blindly accept “experts” claims to disinterested
research. Rather we need to understand
how the transfer from religious to scientific authority in American foreign
policy served certain class, racial, and gender prerogatives. First, while the new
CFR was fronted by social scientists, it was backed by Manhattan bankers and
lawyers. As Sven Beckert has observed,
years of gross capital accumulation had led to a “problem of legitimacy” for
New York’s upper-classes in the years before WWI. Organized religion provided less and less
comfort, as Victorian gospels of wealth gave way to Christian socialism and
other variants of the social gospel.
Urban elites, as Thomas Rzeznik and Matthew Bowman have recently noted,
were robbed of their “spiritual capital” by the pastoral turn toward the poor
and immigrant working classes. The
Inquiry’s secular saints thus offered the CFR’s core membership salvation from
the sins of conspicuous consumption. The
chief architects of the Empire State could continue, in Wilson’s words, to “make
conquest” of Europe, and pursue the uneven development of the Global South, as
a matter of impartial scientific advancement over economic or religious fiat (11).

Similarly, CFR members reinforced gender
and racial hierarchies through its scientific secularism. The “expert” did not have to be male. In fact, a few women had served on Inquiry
research teams, and the committee charged with incorporating the CFR in 1921
had considered whether or not women could be members. Nevertheless, gender trouble was clearly
present at the creation of the new CFR.
When word first got out that the Inquiry’s male remnants were looking to
start an IIA, the lawyer and social worker Frances Kellor took matters into her
own hands. Kellor was best known for her
work in trying to Americanize immigrants from Europe. As she explained in her 1920 book, Immigration and the Future, an American
IIA, understood as a “permanent, non-partisan body of scientific minds,” was
needed to study international relations from the standpoint of American
interests. Kellor even managed to secure
funding and some Inquiry veterans for her imagined Institute. Once the Inquiry’s chief liaison with the old
CFR, Whitney Shepherdson, learned of Kellor’s ambitions, he spoke to
her financial backers and got them to withdraw support. According to Shepherdson, “the incident
served as a prod.” America’s first
foreign policy think tank would be gendered well into the 1970s (12).

And racialized. The influence of Franz Boas notwithstanding,
the postwar scientific turn initially underwrote an increase and not decrease
in racial classification. In most
instances, scientific rhetoric intermingled with older arguments for maintaining
the global subordination of persons of color.
This was evident in Elihu Root’s introductory remarks at a CFR dinner
meeting in 1926. The occasion was to
hear a report from Henry Stimson, who had recently returned from a tour of the
Philippines. Harkening back to his
imperial days as an architect of Philippine annexation, Root erased the familiar lines of foreign and domestic
when he charged that Filipinos—and Mexicans and Italians, for that matter—were
no more ready for “self-government” than African-Americans had been during the
“terrible mistake” of Reconstruction. Yet
Root no longer talked the civilizing talk of the missionary diplomacy he had
been schooled in. Rather, he invoked a
nebulous notion of “public opinion” as a marker of effective modern democracy
that the Filipinos had not yet learned.
Until such time as they did, the US was obligated to “furnish public
opinion” for them. Stimson agreed,
repeating again and again the necessity of American “supervision” over the
islands—if for no other reason than keeping the Chinese and Japanese at
bay. Stimson recommended staying the
middle course between full Filipino independence and statehood, the latter
course being “the most disastrous thing that could happen.” Why “disastrous?” Because incorporation threatened the white
American supremacy, as Kaplan has shown through her analysis of the “Insular”
Supreme Court cases. It is true that, in
his report, Stimson still employed “Christian” as a racial concept—the “so-called
Christian Filipinos,” for instance. Other members closer to the CFR’s heart, like
Isaiah Bowman, instead embraced the new science of eugenics to prop up the old
order (13).

Even still, Bowman and his CFR brethren
were transgressive of what has been called the “religion-secular binary.” In other words, the CFR's secularism was a Protestant secularism. The phrase “Protestant secularism,” as far as
I can tell, was coined by Paul Tillich during the 1920s. Secularism, for Tillich, was “an offspring of
Protestantism and is related to it in co-operation or enmity” (14). But where secularism, for Tillich,
represented society’s loss of transcendental referents, religious studies
scholars such as Talal Asad, Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and more have come
to see secularism as Protestantism’s gain in ability to dominate American
religion, culture, and politics. That is
not to say that secularism is merely “religion in disguise.” Rather, the notion of Protestant secularism
suggests the need for more complex narratives of the historical intersection of
religion and public life (15). In the
case of the CFR, this means wrestling with the fact that, up and through WWII,
most rank-and-file members remained practicing Protestants. Council leaders’ quest for an “intelligent”
foreign policy, through application of scientific method, still assumed—and
counted upon—popular investment in projections of U. S. power formed during the
heydays of missionary diplomacy. Project
managers were expected to mute their religious rhetoric and appeals but not
abandon them altogether. A Henry Luce or
John Foster Dulles might speak secularism for and before CFR audiences—Luce’s
“American Century” essay is literally godless, for instance—while they still immersed themselves in Protestant communities, notably in Dulles’s
leadership of the Federal Council of Churches’ “Just and Durable Peace” crusade
during WWII.

However, the CFR’s most interesting
Protestant secularist was Francis Pickens Miller, who would eventually coordinate
the CFR’s first local Foreign Relations Committees (FRCs). Miller was an early groupie of CFR work,
following his Rhodes scholarship, yet he was also a secretary in and eventual
chairman of Protestantism’s premier missionary agency, the World’s Student
Christian Federation (WSCF). In 1930,
Miller and his wife Helen would publish a study of the Americanization of
Western Europe entitled The Giant of the
Western World. Religious discourse
and concerns were largely absent from the work.
At the same time, upon publication, Miller wrote to his brother (a
missionary to Persia) that “just as the Roman roads and Latin speech made
Paul’s great work possible so the American method of industry and commerce and
the universal acceptance of the English language is creating a situation in
which it will be possible once again to build a concept of Christendom.” For Miller, then, the secular scientific
vision of a Shotwell or a Bowman was a prerequisite to the global outreach of
Christian American culture (16).

To come back to the theme of this panel,
how successful were CFR members in secularizing
statecraft? On the one hand, not very
so, given that post-WWI Presidents remained purveyors of
Protestant-based civil religion as well as that a revival of Christian
nationalism undergird America’s universal nationalism of the WWII and Cold War
years—a Christian nationalism that CFR members such as Miller and Dulles
championed. On the other hand, CFR
members such as Bowman oversaw the transition from the liberal Christian
developmentalism of a Beveridge or Wilson to the technocratic visions of Point
IV and postwar modernization theory. To
assert that the once-hoped-for Christian Century actually witnessed the
circumscription of organized religious authority is not to fall back on the old
secularization narrative. Instead, it is
to realize that the American Century was an outgrowth of a post-WWI interplay
between Protestants and secularists. It is to recognize that tracking
religious influence in American foreign relations is a trickier business than
noting where "God" is or is not explicitly invoked. It is to admit that the religious turn still
has a long way to go.

1. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and
Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 4.

2. See Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Chapters 12-15; and Malcolm Magee, What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and
the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy (Waco: Baylor University
Press, 2008).

3. Albert Beveridge, “The March of the
Flag,” Address, Indiana Republican Campaign, Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis,
Sept. 16, 1898, in The Meaning of the
Times and Other Speeches (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1908).

5. See Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East:
Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810-1927 (University of Minnesota
Press, 1971); James Reed, The Missionary
Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911-1915 (Harvard University Asia
Center, 1983); and Susan K. Harris, God’s
Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).

6. Phillip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade
(New York: HarperOne, 2014).

7. Memorandum (circa 1921), Committee on
Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR, Box 34, Folder 1. For an early history of the merger that
emphasizes the claims of this paragraph, see “Council on Foreign Relations,
History” (circa 1922), in CFR, Box 39, Folder 5.

8. On Shotwell, see Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of
Internationalism in America (London: Associated University Presses, 1975),
especially pp. 41-43.

10. Amy Kaplan,The Anarchy of Empire in the
Making of U. S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
95-101. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

11. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001), Chapter 10 and Epilogue; Thomas Rzeznik, Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-Era Philadelphia
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 8; Matthew
Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City
and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014).

14. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1948), 213-16. The
chapter from which these quotations are taken was originally published in a
1929 collection of Tillich’s German essays.